You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
“Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”
We tend to accept that centralized institutions can use their power to simplify complex problems and can hire the finest minds and best technologies to analyze and tame them—technologies like advanced statistical or computer models that will find optimal solutions. But institutional power doesn’t always produce simplification; large, centralized organizations tend to be bureaucratic, cumbersome, and inefficient.
Most opinion leaders in rich countries are drawn from this elite, and their exposure to the difficulties confronting the majority of the world’s population, which lives in poorer societies, is limited and extremely selective. So, not surprisingly, they often underestimate these societies’ requirements for ingenuity, misjudge the kind of ingenuity they need, and overestimate their ability to supply it. The super elite is also a largely self-enclosed and self-referential group—making it vulnerable to internally generated intellectual fads, which it then disseminates to the rest of the world’s population.
Heat. Everywhere there was heat. It surrounded and penetrated me. It defined the world around me. Sweat gushed out of my body, running in rivulets down my chest and the small of my back, gluing my shirt to my skin. Everything was tangibly hot: tables, chairs, and pens were weirdly warm to the touch, because everything outside my body was hotter than my body. The water in my bottle felt like soup on my tongue. Any movement of the air—a draft, a slight breeze—was a relief; while any movement of my body or mind was an effort. Physical action, thought, even consciousness itself seemed to take place in slow motion, weighed down and dulled by the relentless, inescapable heat.
N.B. Homer-Dixon is describing his experience in India, and having lived there for nearly two years, I can relate. But then given current trends, perhaps we're all headed there.
Like imagination and consciousness, language seems to be one of those things that Whitehead said were ‘incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves’.
Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.
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